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Bernardino Ochino, elected vicar-general of the newly founded Capuchin Order in 1538, had become a prominent Catholic preacher before converting to Protestantism and fleeing to Geneva in 1542. His defection was a great shock, and several attempts were made to reconcile him to the Catholic Church. In this letter, Ignatius asks Claude Jay to make […]

Ignatius offers this letter, combining firmness with humility, as a response to Nicolás Bobadilla’s outspoken protests against Ignatius’s regulations concerning letter writing. Ignatius confesses to a blunder (addressing a letter to Bobadilla in a king’s palace rather than the court) and asks for correction in such circumstances. “For this is my desire in this life,”

In the following letter, Ignatius enjoins that greater order and care be used when Jesuits write to him. Their regular letters, Ignatius explains, might be shown to the Society’s friends and benefactors. Recently, Ignatius wished to show some of the letters to “a couple of cardinals,” whom Ignatius believed could help the situations raised in

King John III of Portugal was the early Society of Jesus’s strongest royal supporter. All the more painful to the Society, then, was a serious quarrel that broke out between the Portuguese king and Pope Paul III after the latter appointed the former ambassador of Portugal as a cardinal. The king responded by recalling his ambassador

In the following letter, Ignatius offers a reproof to a Jesuit scholastic. Giovanni Battista Viola professed obedience yet sought to impose his own solution to an academic difficulty, which he had created by ignoring Ignatius’s directions. Ignatius responded with his two understandings of “blind” obedience. Viola had gone to Paris with Andrés de Oviedo in

The following text is the “Formula of the Institute” composed by St. Ignatius and his first companions in 1539 as a kind of charter or mission statement for the new Society of Jesus. It was inserted with minor revisions into the 1540 bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, in which Pope Paul III formally approved the foundation

Subsequent to their initial deliberations during Lent in 1539, the eleven men determined their religious order would include a vow of obedience. They offered their shared intentions to enter that organization by signing the following vow of obedience, if, the vow notes, the group “will be confirmed by the pope.” Papal approval for the Society

This document, a chapter from the Part IX of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, articulates the desired qualities in the Jesuits’ superior general. Though the Constitutions were not approved until the first General Congregation of 1558, the first Jesuits elected Ignatius as their superior general in April 1541. Ignatius collaborated with Juan Alfonso

The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus recognized the difficulty in maintaining a unity among Jesuits so dispersed in the world, noting that “the Society cannot be preserved or governed, or consequently, attain the aim it seeks for the greater glory of God unless its members are united among themselves and with their head.” In Part

The Society of Jesus—much like “all well-organized communities or congregations”—appoints a person “whose proper duty,” according to the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, “is to attend to the universal good.” For the Jesuits in particular, the superior general’s “duty is the good government, preservation, and growth of the whole body of the Society.” (Rather